Daisuke Matsuzaka is nothing if he isn’t confounding

Friday

May 28, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2010 at 11:21 PM

Mike Fine

Theoretically, if Terry Francona had a full head of hair Thursday morning, chances are he would have pulled it all out by Thursday night.

That’s how it goes with Daisuke Matsuzaka. Nothing has changed. Not 72/3 innings of no-hit ball at Philadelphia. Not the promise of having overcome his pre-season neck strain. Fact is, he is what he is, and the Red Sox will probably have to live with their inconsistent right-hander for as long as they own him.

The latest: His eight-walk outing against the Royals, including a career-worst five-walk fifth that ultimately led to three runs and a 4-3 loss on the first game of the homestand. All the good stuff that happened to the Sox in Philadelphia and Tampa Bay pretty much went out the window with this confounding appearance in which Matsuzaka didn’t even get the loss. Joe Nelson did for giving up one run.

“I think we’d all rather sit there and see a guy pound the zone,” said Francona, who simply never knows what he’s going to get, “because that’s certainly what we’re shooting for, but the other thing is he has the ability to get out of those things, so if you get frustrated and go out too early … getting the bullpen out of whack isn’t a way for success either. So if there’s one guy you can kind of gamble with with men on it’s probably Dice-K, but I admit that’s a lot of pitches, a lot of baserunners, a lot of walks.”

What Francona was talking about was the fourth inning, when Matsuzaka loaded the bases with no outs on a walk, a single and a hit batter, only to escape with two soft infield liners and an outfield fly. But the bad Daisuke appeared in the fifth. He simply didn’t have a handle on his body, complaining of lower body soreness that messed with his delivery. So he began with the first of his five walks, tying a career high, for the inning. At one point he walked in a run. He allowed another on a wild pitch and one on a single by David DeJesus that was misplayed off the wall by Jeremy Hermida.

Francona was hopeful Matsuzaka could recover from the fourth, but given that he threw 42 pitches in an incomplete fifth, the manager had no choice but to look to his bullpen. “You take into consideration what you can do with the bullpen,” he said. “When you’re losing, the last thing you want to do is look out and have to figure out we got Pap and Bard and Okie for innings. That doesn’t work. All of a sudden you might keep it close, but tomorrow night you’re chasing your tail so you don’t want to do that.”

As it was, Francona came out OK. Nelson gave up the one run, but Manny Delcarmen and Ramon Ramirez were outstanding.

Matsuzaka, meanwhile, didn’t have many explanations.

“I think mechanically my lower body wasn’t cooperating with me today,” he said, “so I had to rely too much on my upper body. I think between these two starts I had noticed a little bit of soreness there but I didn’t have any problems with my side session, so it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind going into this start tonight. But … I just couldn’t make the necessary adjustments.”

Funny thing was, Matsuzaka looked positively terrific early on. He threw only 20 total pitches in the 1-2-3 second and third innings. “It might have looked like I got out of those innings OK.” He said, “but in my mind I still felt there were adjustments I needed to make. It’s been a long time since my body didn’t cooperate like this. I think the velocity was there but there was no movement and there was no bite to my pitches, not to mention any command. So there’s nothing Tek (catcher Jason Varitek) could have done.”

“We just couldn’t find a way,” Varitek said. “Usually you can find one or two pitches with him that kind of can slow him down. He had a hard time slowing down. He was pretty amped.”

Next week, Matsuzaka will get the ball again against Oakland. Not a soul on earth knows what they’re going to see. “In my good outings I can throw the ball without overthinking too much and still be able to pitch well,” he said, “but when things are going bad, no matter what I try to get out of it, things just don’t click and I can’t build that momentum. But in general I know that I can’t be over-conscious of that.

“I still need to pitch. As for tonight, I just need to look back at my performance and find those bad elements and hopefully clear them up.”

Good luck with that.

Reach Mike Fine at mikefine@ledger.com. Read more of his Red Sox coverage in his Dirty Water blog at PatriotLedger.com/sports